Space Exploration―A History in 100 Objects

You should certainly have this book for its history of the development of astronomy and mathematics which facilitated space exploration. I certainly still have my father’s slide rule with which he did all his engineering calculations...So the first problem is as to which objects make the cut. Mr Odenwald , by the way, is an excellent science educator and writer so the book is always entertaining.I personally would have left out the 3 Native American objects; the star charts are at least 1000 years behind the Babylonians and Greeks and the celestial’ sun dagger’ was several millennia behind Stonehenge or the Orkneys. But the choice is always half the fun of these 100 object books. The one on fossils simply gets round this restriction by including thousands!Leaving aside nitpicking over selection (was the Hasselblad really neccessary?), there are two major problems with the book and both concern the modern space race.Firstly, I know the author works in the US space industry, but he shows gross disrespect to the Russians. Working in a ghastly and dreadful political country, they still pioneered the space race - to their surprise and the total dismay of those of us in the west who knew they could not even feed and clothe their population.Odenwald says Sputnik won the space race for the Russians “For a few months”.Now this is factually extremely false. Make that 3 or 4 years! 1st satellites, first animals , men and women in space, ditto two and (spacious!) 3 men space craft. And all under the direction of a man the Russians themselves had to rescue from the Gulag and who came out with just his tin drinking mug. The book has no index but even if it had there is no entry for Korolev, his launchers and his rapidly developed satellites and capsules. Also by definition they had space suits way before the US.The camps fatally damaged his health and maybe his early death and the regime’s failure to understand the prestige of the program led to them losing the space race... Except that all US visitors to the International Space Station go and return on Russian rockets...Then on the US side there is just one small reference to the part played by Germans in the US program and by the Germans connection to Nazi war crimes.You can never meet an American who wasn’t charmed by Von Braun. That’s what he did. Despite the Dr Strangelove accent! They hid and classified his record, allowed him to lie by saying he hardly ever visited Dora where V2s were made and 28,000 people died, the largest non Jewish death camp. The US army even financed a movie about him , hinting that he helped the allies. The movie flopped as cinema goers took to altering the title of I Aim for the Stars. What the army could not cover up was that his brother and production manager Rudolf had both been at Dora for many months. The US had much more success in covering up the wartime career of space suit and space medicine pioneer Strughold. Libraries and awards were named after him until it leaked out that he had experimented on and murdered children from Auschwitz during the war.I do not mean to belittle the US space efforts; every thing from the Moon our to Pluto, Hubble and communications satellites has been fantastic. But maybe there are better books to take you there.Incidentally, unlike the other two reviewers, I bought this book and can review it independently!